March 3, 2014

Wanderlust Wednesdays: all the royal horses

Hello friends! and welcome to Monday and better yet, Wanderlust Monday! I hope you all had a fabulous weekend and are ready to take on the week! We got a lot done over the weekend with putting our apartment together, hanging up photos, writing thank you notes, etc. We finally got silverware!! FINALLY! It really does take a long time to get an apartment in order once you move in! We also took my nephew on a date to the space museum and my sister and my niece came over and my oh my, that little girl is talking so much! I couldn't believe it. She was very excited about her new shoes my mom gave her and the first thing she said to me when she walked in was "shoes!" as she held out her feet for me to see. Swoon.

and thanks for listening to me whine and ramble on friday. it was one of those days, you know? but let's move on and be happy. let's talk about London!

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While on my study abroad in London, I went to Buckingham Palace and took a tour of the Royal Mews, where the royals keep all the carriages and horses.

^^Buckingham Palace is so beautiful^^

^^i mean. right??? it is iconic for a reason!^^

^^The Royal Horses (see i capitalized that? i never do that. but they are ROYAL animals, so...)^^

^^The carriage the Princess Diana rode into her wedding! How cool is that?^^

^^The Rolls Royce Kate rode in to her wedding!!^^

^^The carriage Kate and Will rode in after the wedding. It seriously looks like something out of a fairy tale.^^

The day after,my class had a tour of the Globe! Here is where I had celebrity sighting number one, which is like American royalty, right?

^^They were in the middle of rehearsing for Much Ado About Nothing, so you can see the actors here on stage. For those of you who watched Fresh Prince of Bel Air on TV back in the day, you probably remember the character Geoffrey, who was the butler. Ya. He is the black guy on stage on the right in this picture.^^

We also ran into him behind the theatre as we were walking by and we were all staring at him and he just smiled politley and chuckled at us while he stood there and smoked.

Now for the real good story....

The next day I was at my apartment when my friend came in and said Anne Hathaway was on our street. Let me repeat. Anne Hathaway was on our street. I jumped out my chair, ran into the living room, and exclaimed "who wants to go with me!!" My friend Amy jumped up and we ran out of the apartment. We were so frazzled and excited and as we were leaving, we realized we didn't have keys and wouldn't be able to back in our apartment so, due to our hysteria and excitement that a real live celebrity was near us, we started screaming at each other that we didn't have keys. In the midst of our screaming, students from another study abroad came down the stairs and were staring at us like we were freaks. Which is understandable, because we were sure acting like them.

Once we had the key, we booked it out of the apartment while still yelling at each other at how excited we were to see Anne. {Disclaimer: I kind of hate Anne Hathaway, but regardless, she is a huge celebrity and we were just excited to see a celebrity that we actually knew and recognized. No matter how annoying I think she is, how many times did I watch The Princess Diaries growing up?} We ran down the street, and saw a small clump of people. There was Anne Hathaway, 10 feet away from me, doing a photo shoot. My friend and I kept our squealing to a bare minimum because we didn't want to act like idiots in front of Anne.

We wanted to take pictures, but when we got out our cameras, one of her assistants came up to us an asked us not to, something about "this is a magazine shoot, everything is copyrighted, we want to make sure you have no proof of this monumental day, blah, blah, blah..." Anne was jumping in the air and attempting to do the splits. She looked kind of ridiculous and I think she knew it because she was laughing really hard at herself. She was wearing a very Jackie Kennedy-esque outfit: a black and red striped straight cut cardigan and one inch black kitten heels with a simple black skirt. We had only watched her for about five minutes when her her crew stared packing up. she crossed the street, with her hand around the hip of her makeup artist and went into The Gore hotel (really? the gore hotel? did it used to be a hospital during WWII? Come on, guys.) It was very surreal. She was so close. I could have walked 5 steps and taken a selfie with her if i was crazy enough to try.

And that sums up this edition of Wanderlust Monday!

ps. I guess the Oscars were last night? Did you watch? I haven't seen annnnny of the nominated films.